Search and Recover 4 by iola is software that you might think you will never need. Recovery software is usually something you don't know you need until you really need it , and then you
really need it. I vividly remember the first time I needed to "undelete" something. I was just learning to program and after hours of work, compiled the program then deleted the source. That was not even a rookie mistake. That was just stupid. Thankfully, before I gave up programming for the rest of my life, my dad came to the rescue. He had a DOS 3.3 tool that would look for deleted files and was able to recover my source code.
It's been a while since I looked at recovery software but after spending a few hours with iola Search and Recover 4, I was really impressed. Search and Recover 4 doesn't resemble the DOS 3.3 tool my dad used but it will save the day by finding lost files.
Windows has a file system called NTFS that, like any modern file system, doesn't actually erase files when you delete them but marks them as deleted so the drive space can be available for other uses. If the file system were to truly erase a file from the disk when it was deleted, it would need to overwrite that disk space with blank data. While that's entirely possible to do, it would just make your machine run slower because overwriting each byte of data takes longer than just marking it as deleted.
When you run Search and Recover 4, it will look through the raw contents of the hard drive to see what is a candidate for recovery. It is possible that other programs have started using the newly freed space to store data, so your odds of recovering a file are best if you try to recover it right after it's been deleted. If you wait too long on an active system, there's a good chance the files will not be recoverable. Search and Recover 4 will indicate the likelihood of a recovery with high, medium, or low.
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When you delete a file in Windows, the directory structure is still somewhat maintained. If you delete the whole folder, then Windows leaves the deleted data in an Orphaned Files directory until they are overwritten by something else. In Search and Recover 4, you will see these files in directories called $$$Orphaned files$$$. Files deleted in folders that still exist will show up in their normal folders.[orphans.jpg]
Probably the nicest feature of Search and Recover 4 is the SmartScan technology. (As a side note, iolo and about 50 other companies, including G.E., claim to have a trademark on the term SmartScan.) SmartScan will filter out files that you probably don't want to recover. These are system temporary files and other data files that will probably have no use once you recover them. I was able to filter my results from about 5000 down to 1000 using SmartScan.
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Another great feature is the preview mode. Once you have your recovery candidates, you can filter the results by pictures or documents or movies and then turn on a preview. You might be dealing with a few thousand recovery candidates so this mode will really help you find the specific files you want.
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